My voice teacher, Kimberly once told me something about songs that I found fascinating.

She said that when I share a song; it does not belong to me anymore.

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Her reasoning was that every person interprets a song with his or her own life experience. Whatever inspired me to write the song is irrelevant because my interpretation is mine alone.

The reason I mention this is that I recently wrote a new song, which I plan to name “My Shining Star.” I wrote it imagining a future lover speaking to me, and I’ve had a prophecy about that for a long time. But it turned out that my song actually held interpretations that I didn’t even realize until I started singing it. Tears gushed forth with the revelation that my song once again was a gift of healing for me.

As I begin to share about my newest song creation, I must mention how the idea for it actually began. It happened when I left a comment on one of my favorite blogs. It inspired me to write lyrics to go with the haunting chords I’d recently composed.

My comment was to Julie Goyder who writes a touching blog that I follow. Julie lives in Australia on a large acreage of land with her 20-year-old son. Her husband is in a nursing home; he suffers from Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer. She spends a great deal of time and energy taking him on excursions and gave up her career. Clearly, she is completely devoted to both her son and husband.

Because Julie is a positive thinker and has a great deal of humor, her blog is really special to read. I relate to many things that she writes about and she has been especially supportive of so much of what I’ve written.

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Last week, Julie posted that her husband had an aggressive episode due to his dementia. He was uncooperative and the nursing home called her trying to get him to calm down. Over the phone he shouted expletives at her and she lost it.

I suffered so when my mother had dementia. She was my best friend. I remember one thing that helped me was to see her as two different people. I could hear my “healthy mom” speaking to me when I was in deep despair. I wrote a poem and I want to share it with you. I’ve revised it a little to fit your situation. And I share a link to my story where I wrote it below. Hang in there.

What an amazing friend you are, Judy – thank you so much for this. It is so beautiful! Julie

Judy wrote:

Well Julie, you are an amazing friend as well. Here’s another blessing: By sharing that poem with you I became inspired to write a new song using it as a basis for my lyrics. So in helping you I achieved inspiration to help myself! Love is universal. It has comforted me whenever I’ve projected love that I long for due to death, absence or illness.

While on my short travels recently, I began working on finding chords for a new song. While in Tucson I wrote verses. It was very much like a classical guitar instrumental with dark minor chords.

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Then while I was in Yosemite I wrote the chorus, which was in D major.

This song was quite different musically than anything I had ever discovered before. I was puzzled how both those parts fit together when one was a minor and the other a major.

But when I compose, I simply listen for what my song is supposed to be and allow it to happen.

For weeks I’d hoped to find inspiration for my lyrics, but I could not even write one line. Depression and discomfort in my eyes had me plodding through my life, so I let it go.

But after leaving the comment on Julie’s blog, I began to ponder the concept of a shining star and it was intriguing. As much as “my shining star” seemed like a cliché, it still spun a lot of ideas for me.

There were a lot of metaphors with a shining star. Light in the darkness was one. Light was clarity and darkness was confusion. Light represented illumination; darkness represented feeling lost. Those certainly fit into my frustration with my eyesight.

When I imagined that someday I’d fall in love again, I saw the image of a “knight in shining armor.” Originally my song started with an idea about the love from someone I would eventually meet, which was something I had envisioned for many years.

But most importantly, a shining star represented love that came from the heavens and fit in perfectly with how I have personally coped with grief. The loss of my mother resulting from dementia was the beginning of my poem. With her death only a few months ago, now she truly was my shining star.

Grief was all about love for me. My song poured forth and dazzled me with its beauty.